Mosquito noise refers to distortion of images around sharp edges in digital video pictures. The sharp edges exist in movie titles, types of bikes/cars in racing video and around similar high-contrast edges. The mosquito noise appears as artifacts such as haziness or shimmering around edges. The artifacts are created when the images undergo discrete cosine transforms during compression. The artifacts become more visible in high frequency content with sharp transitions between foreground entities and a background.
Conventional mosquito noise reduction solutions involve special techniques during encoding to reduce the artifacts. A common approach has been to soften the sharp edges to prevent the mosquito noise from being created. However, the special techniques to not afford a solution to deal with the mosquito noise at the decoding/display end.